I hope that it comes soon, but I am unsure if it will ever be released as a 32-bit core. The Windows cores are all 32-bit and running as a 12 thread core instead of 8 would seemingly require about 50% more memory. The 8-thread SMP core A5 I am running right now on a P6900 WU is consuming 1.25GB of RAM. 50% more puts it near the standard 2GB user limit for 32-bit Win32 processes. To do more on 32-bit, the Pande Group would have to build the 32-bit client as Large Address Aware (LAA) images to allow 3GB of user memory space and test the hell out of it to ensure that there are no issues with using pointers with the most-signficant bit being set, since normally, the user space is located in the first 2GB (0x00000000 to 0x7FFFFFFF) range. It would be better to just go to 64-bit. IMO of course.

This might become the first FahCore that requires 64bit Windows. I know nothing about when this might happen or even if that's a realistic guess, but it sure wouldn't surprise me. Those folks running Windows on 12-core hardware probably already have the 64-bit version anyway, so I doubt it's a problem.

Go 64bit ... the 64bit mdrun is 5-10% faster than the 32bit mdrun on windows (due to low-level optimization differences). Other benefits relate to NUMA enhancements and support for > 64 cores.

bruce wrote:This might become the first FahCore that requires 64bit Windows. I know nothing about when this might happen or even if that's a realistic guess, but it sure wouldn't surprise me. Those folks running Windows on 12-core hardware probably already have the 64-bit version anyway, so I doubt it's a problem.

I'm running a 12 core computer, 12GB RAM with Windows 7 64 bit. It has to Windows 7 so going to Unix as the host OS isn't an option for this particular computer. Sure would be nice to let those 12 cores loose on 6903 BIG Bigadv !! With 12GB RAM, RAM is not a problem, and if it was, I could upgrade it to 24GB.

So when / how can we run Project 6903 on a computer with Windows 7 64 bit as the host OS?

VMWare is cool except for the 8 core limitation. I searched it appears that limitation still holds. When I was running it 8 core the TPF is slightly worse, but I think it was less than a 10% hit, which if you must use a virtual machine isn't too bad. And of course, there's the more serious hit of being limited to 8 cores on hosts that have more than 8 cores. Thanks for the suggestions anyway!

On the "Processor" tab, you can set how many virtual CPU cores the guest operating systems should see. Starting with version 3.0, VirtualBox supports symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) and can present up to 32 virtual CPU cores to each virtual machine.